Monday, November 09, 2015

--Caitlyn Jenner: As the OUT100’s Newsmaker of the Year, there couldn’t have been a more momentous year for Caitlyn Jenner than this one. After coming out as transgender to Diane Sawyer, revealing her new name with Vanity Fair and receiving the Arthur Ashe Courage Award at the ESPY’s she noted, “I’m so terribly excited about the future. I have so many things to do. I have a place in life.”

--Sarah Kate Ellis: The personal has always been political for Sarah Kate Ellis, who appeared kissing her wife, the musician Kristen Henderson, on a now-famous cover of Time magazine in April 2013. Legislation and court decisions are only part of the puzzle,” she says. “Continuing to change the culture and accelerate acceptance is the work we are doing at GLAAD.”

--Aisha Moodie-Mills: Before 2015, when she became president and CEO of the Victory Fund, the nation’s largest resource for LGBT public officials, Aisha Moodie-Mills was a political adviser, private sector liaison, and fundraiser for members of Congress. The main reason I joined Victory was because I believe that the key to equality is representation,” Moodie-Mills says. “If you are not at the table, then you are on the menu.”

--Chai Feldblum: Chai has been commissioner of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission since 2010, but 2015 was a red-letter year, the culmination of decades of advocacy for the law professor and former clerk to Supreme Court associate justice Harry Blackmun (to whom she came out in the early 1990s). This summer, in a landmark ruling in Baldwin v. Foxx, the EEOC skillfully applied the 1964 Civil Rights Act to a case of discrimination against a gay federal employee.